RICHARD KAY on Megan's eye-popping new biography - Royal Family Story.

 

Smiling into the digicam like the iconic hooded figure from the Scottish Widows TV adverts, her appearance in the scene used to be one to savour. But, regardless of the placing similarities, the then actress Meghan Markle was not capturing a commercial.

She was in Malta getting to know her roots and the headdress she used to be wearing was an fundamental prop.

Her go to to the Mediterranean island was in 2015, a 12 months earlier than she met her future husband Prince Harry, and the time out has when you consider that become an crucial waypoint in the narrative of the Duchess of Sussex’s life. She later wrote that its reason used to be about ‘trying to understand where I got here from, my identity’, adding: ‘There is something so lovely about becoming in a piece of the puzzle.’

In a blog put up at the time Meghan said: ‘Before I got here human beings have been telling me, “When you go to Malta, everybody will look like you”, and I commenced to say, “Oh, my gosh, I do kind of blend in” and it’s the most lovable of feelings.’

She recalled her Markle grandmother announcing that her father’s great-great-great grandmother Mary lived in Malta with a British soldier referred to as Thomas Bird. They married and had a baby born in 1862. The story had the introduced piquant twist that Mary used to be said to have been employed as a cook at Windsor Castle. A high-quality tale, you might think, for any person who was once to marry the Queen’s grandson. But is it true?

According to the investigative writer Tom Bower, Meghan ‘had no “ancestry” in Malta’. The 19th-century soldier Thomas Bird did marry Mary but in Dublin in 1860 — ‘clearly excluding any employment in Windsor Castle’.

Bird, he says, ‘was posted with his wife to India and quickly to Malta. Soon after a son was once born and they moved to Canada, where Thomas died.’

Bower, whose explosive book, Revenge: Meghan, Harry And The War Between The Windsors, is posted this week, adds: ‘Thomas Markle would dispute that his mom ever conjured the story about the Markles’ connection to Malta.’

So why does this matter? After all, Meghan is hardly ever the first person to perhaps over-elaborate a household myth. But to Bower, who has written a string of exposés of famous names, the episode is attribute of the female whose marriage to Harry has plunged the monarchy into its greatest crisis given that the dying of Princess Diana.

Nothing illustrates that greater in reality than the competing — and vastly exclusive — family recollections he has uncovered referring to to the Los Angeles race riots of 1992. Video emerged of four white policemen beating Rodney King, an African-American motorist, all through his arrest for riding while intoxicated the yr before.

After the officers had been acquitted of assault, massive swathes of the town erupted in protest with neighbourhoods torched.

Bower says that Meghan’s father, by then divorced from her mom Doria, took immediately action to guard his ten-year-old daughter. ‘During the afternoon that the riots commenced he drove with her to Palm Springs,’ he writes.

His ex-wife declined to be part of them. ‘I feel pretty safe,’ she had instructed Thomas in a telephone conversation.

Bower continues: ‘There are serious doubts that Meghan noticed any violence, no longer even the minor looting near the ABC studio (where Markle worked as a TV lighting engineer). After 5 days the curfew used to be lifted and they lower back to Los Angeles.’

Yet Meghan’s account, more than 20 years later, used to be of a one of a kind experience. ‘I consider the curfew,’ she said, ‘and I bear in mind speeding back domestic and on that drive home, seeing ash fall from the sky and smelling the smoke and seeing people run out of constructions carrying baggage and looting.’

She said she had seen men in the back of a van maintaining guns and rifles. ‘Those reminiscences don’t go away,’ she insisted.

Later still, in an interview for Vanity Fair she recalled that as ‘the ash from road fires sifted down on suburban lawns . . . she exclaimed, “Oh my God, mommy, it’s snowing.” “No, Flower,” Doria answered. “It’s no longer snow. Get in the house.” ’

Bower says Markle was once ‘incredulous when he examine his daughter’s version of these events.’

Meghan, he claimed, didn’t see Doria for the length of the riots.

Of all the testimonies Meghan has promoted about her childhood, few are more acquainted than that of the boxed set of Barbie dolls. But even that, according to Tom Bower, is no longer without dispute.

She recalled ‘fawning over’ them as a seven-year-old. The set, known as the Heart Family, included ‘a mom doll, a dad doll and two children’, which she described as a ‘perfect nuclear family’ offered only in units of white dolls or black dolls.

Tags: Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Prince Louis, Prince William and Kate Middleton, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Meghan, Lilibet

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